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I had an excellent day with Cheslyn Hay High School Year 9s. The school is very big on giving pupils the opportunity to develop their business and social skills.

The pupils did an Intelligence Quiz and a mini-challenge to create an art installation to demonstrate the future of Cheslyn Hay. We then gave them a budget of £100k to develop any part of town into a Social Enterprise Business.

All pupils came up with great ideas and then presented them to a judging panel made up of local business representatives: Peter Cadman, Julie Lee and Tracey Wellings.There was a lot of ‘facing your fears’ as the pupils stood out front with a microphone in their hands and we ended up with fourteen superb presentations.

It was great to have the opportunity to deliver a Modern Foreign Languages day to Year 9 pupils at Shire Oak Academy.

With my Business Supporters, Helen Gelsthorpe-Smith (Henn and Westwood), PSCO Bernie Craze (West Midlands Police), Glenys Price (Gap Language Services), Jacqui Pountney MBE (Walsall Equestrian Society) and Sam Samuels (HSBC Bank) I delivered a three hour session that gave information on the value of learning a language to future careers and asked the pupils to create and make presentations using as many languages as they could.

The pupils worked hard and producing amazing ideas. It was a great day and I hope many of the pupils choose a language as a GSCE option.

I’m pleased to announce that Education Business Ltd has gained the national Matrix Quality Award for providing Information, Advice and Guidance to young people in schools. We passed the rigorous assessment process and look forward to continuing our work in local schools

A great day at Blue Coat Academy with their Year 9 pupils today. We got them to use design skills to create their own ideas from K’nex kits. They only had half an hour and it was wonderful too see what they came up with.

Employers want more kids to have experience and knowledge of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths so I would suggest they get more involved in school-based projects to give first-hand information and advice to our young people.

There was so much talent on show today that it was inspiring and gave me great hope for the future.

An official evaluation of the assessment – taken by 600,000 children for the first time last summer – found that most schools believed it told them “nothing new” about pupils’ ability.

The study also revealed that more than half of teachers thought the test was “too difficult” and was largely unsuitable for high-ability pupils or those at the other end of the spectrum with special needs and English as a second language.

It also emerged that most schools were in favour of using a variety of different methods to teach reading – not an exclusive focus on the phonics system favoured by the Government.

The conclusions will be seen as a blow to the Coalition which has ordered state primaries across the country to introduce the new assessment.

As part of the reforms, pupils are supposed to accurately “decode” a list of 40 words using phonics – the back-to-basics method in which words are broken down into constituent parts.

The list includes a number of made-up words such as “voo”, “terg”, “bim”, “thazz” and “spron” to ensure pupils are properly employing the phonics system.

It is intended to mark out pupils struggling the most after a year of compulsory education – allowing teachers to target them with extra help.

The Department for Education insisted it had been used to identify some 235,000 pupils who were not up to the required standard in reading last summer.

But an evaluation of last year’s exam – based on interviews with 940 teachers and 844 literacy consultants – also found widespread apathy towards the tests.

Here’s a good one. Maria Rudden has started a petition to get Michael Gove to teach for a term in a school.

He’ll never do it but it’s got to be worth signing the petition to put a bit of pressure on.

I think all Government ministers should be required to work in the area they are managing. Perhaps some real world decisions could be made based on experience instead of meetings with the great and not so good.